Va Va Violet
how a lie becomes a truth
In memory of my beautiful mom, Peggy Lea, born on July 4th, 1929.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY 4th OF JULY GIRL! from your daughter, Karin Lea, with great love and admiration.
I don’t know how you did it, but I am very grateful that you did.
We believed that we looked better with it on, my mother and I, she in her Love That Red, I in my Va Va Violet, fresh-faced victims of the lipstick lie: as you are, will never do.
And so believed Elizabeth, Marilyn, Deborah, Ava, and a host of other post-World War II beauty queens, deployed to perform the sell for the titans of an industry dripping with dough, the glamorous reps of relentless ad campaigns, pitching the notion that a woman can, a woman must, look better than she does. Agents of false fantasies, storybook endings, fairy tales. All will be well if you look like us, do as we do.
Don’t be you.
The mouths, the lips, the hues, the promises, the dreams beckoned seductively from the glossy full-page ads within the covers of America’s most trusted magazines - Good Housekeeping, Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post. Be your best in Bed of Roses. Be more with Diva, with Cherries in the Snow, with Fire and Ice, with Certainly Red, with Shanghai.
My mother, head deep in the diaper pail, back bent over the laundry pile, heeded the call of luscious allure. Bombshell Red, Love Is On, Burma Red, High Society, Jazz. And with quick strokes, always quick strokes - who had time? - she devotedly applied Love That Red, no matter how frazzled, no matter how tired, whenever she left the house for the grocery store, the shoe store, the drug store,the hardware store, towing two if not three, maybe four, or all five of us behind her, in fancied cosmetic kinship with the beautiful life of a Grace Kelly.
And while the sophisticated starlets and the make-up magnates sold us the goods I, too young for True Red, with my young mouth still pale and naked observed my mother closely and marched with my female baby boomer compatriots, towards womanhood with self-doubt eating its way into the innocent center of our young psyches, corrupting the core with the rotten belief that a girl must be more, more, more, with Ravish Me Red, Pink in the Afternoon, Flushed or Midnight Mystery. Worth hinged on desirability, winning the game of choose-me.
A plain me would never do.
When the face of a seventeen year old British waif named Twiggy graced the April, 1967 cover of Vogue magazine, traditional style was turned on its head for good and the beauty world went mod. Trusty Love That Red was traded in for Frosty Glazed Peach.
Bye-bye bright reds, hello pastels. So long sophistication, welcome youth culture. Come on in do-your-own-thing, see you later post-war conformity. Thin was in, curves were out. Replete with false eyelashes, freckles, loud eye shadow, a pale pout, skinny limbs and mini skirt, Twiggy and her waif-ish friends flipped the definition of female beauty from femme fatale to boyish boho. I was fifteen years old.
Each morning before school, in front of the large mirrored medicine cabinet in the yellow-tiled upstairs bathroom of my childhood home, I elbowed my sisters aside, jockeyed for prime position and pulled out the tray of cosmetics, my tools of transformation, from the cabinet’s lower shelf and proceeded to paint my young face. First the false eyelashes, then, a sweep of dark-brown eyeliner, a splash of blue eye shadow, a splatter of fake freckles and a smear of Yardley’s soft Piccadilly Pink lipstick. I stood back and surveyed my Twiggy-ness in the mirror, then turned sideways to view my profile.
The mod-waif movement worshiped ‘thin’ and I had became a devoted follower of the latest fad diet, Dr. Stillman’s quick Weight Loss Diet, my food intake restricted to tiny minute-steaks, cottage cheese, ketchup and coffee plus as many straightened-out cigarette butts as I could heist from the living room ashtrays. Perfection was just a matter of five pounds, Twiggy’s statement eyes and Piccadilly Pink.
The limits of cosmetic beauty and, to a larger extent, the limits of the post-war American dream were starting to show themselves, however, by the late ‘60’s. A long-haired, bra-less, make-up-less, convention-less, anti-materialistic counterculture was making a lot of noise and presenting a face that no amount of eyeliner or fake freckles or Snow Poppy Frost could cover-up, a face of intense outrage at ‘the man’, the status quo, the Viet Nam war, racial injustice, capitalism, patriarchal convention.
‘Get down’ and ‘get real’ were ‘where it was at’ and the peace-niks, hippies and revolutionaries didn’t have much use for superficiality such as Bare Affair, On the Mauve or Toast of New York. Even at home, things were getting real and a new face was showing itself, an unhappy one. It belonged to my mother.
One afternoon my sister had startled our mother while she was vacuuming in an upstairs bedroom. Surprised, she turned around sharply to reveal her tear-streaked face, red and ravaged from crying. Nothing had turned out the way she thought it would, she cried. My sister was shocked and later reported the details to me. I was shocked, too.
Our beautiful mother, she who chased the elusive five pounds as hard as any woman and never walked out her door without Love That Red or Frosty Glazed Peach carefully applied, she who had married the young handsome medical student, she who had given birth to five beautiful daughters, she who had followed the rules, played the game and seemingly won the prized life, was disillusioned, miserable.
As the well-ordered American universe began to crack up it started to dawn on me that life was much more than a look and a lipstick. And while I adored the groovy-ness of Glitter Sweet Pink, Snow Poppy and Candied Violet and my far-out waifish role models, Twiggy, Penelope Tree and Jean ‘The Shrimp’ Shrimpton, I, too, felt constrained by traditional American culture and the limitations it imposed on anyone not white, not male, not square.
Behind my fake eyelashes, freckles and evolving eating disorder, there was a smart young woman, who, like her mother, could play the beauty game as well as anyone, but realized that she was more than pretty. I was smart and I was ambitious in a system that only wanted pretty and powerless. Where did that leave me and my London Luv Pink?
Lies betray and over the years I experienced the bitter taste of betrayal, just like my mother did, just for being female. It’s a sour sharpness that burns when you swallow, the acidic anger that eats out a hollow where your powerful self is supposed to live.
But the rules of the game aren’t written by those of us who fumble in our backpacks, pockets and purses for Rum Raisin or Barely There. The rules are written by men. And in spite of the great distances we travel to be who we are and as we are, we are never more than lifers doing time in the lipstick lie.
These days lipstick colors are brash and rebellious. The young girls who wear them look brash and rebellious. Knockout, Bizarre, Groupie and Shook. It’s cool not to care. It’s ok to be nasty. Bad Conduct, Freak, Bossy, Hustle. I-don’t-give-a-damn colors. Smashes, Habits, Time to Chill, Undone. They look like they mean it, the colors and the girls. They look powerful, in control. But they are not. They are caught, just like me in the lipstick lie, wearing their Baby Bite and Crush.
If I were to write a billion times across the sky in the deep plum red of Va Va Violet, I AM PERFECT AS I AM, I AM PERFECT AS I AM, I AM PERFECT AS I AM… I would remain unconvinced.
If you live a lie long enough it becomes your truth.
With that said, I ventured out to the grocery store yesterday with bare-naked lips. I bought a gallon of milk. Somehow, I survived.
The paradox of modern feminity.. so many aspects to be discussed here.
Well said…..and all the years I have know you, you hid it well! I always thought You and your Sistyer had a natural beauty and the world figured out to the finest degree. Never thought in my wildest dreams you had even close to the self doubts I lived with……..