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Joan Rivers Like most of my friends of a certain age, I’ve been riveted by the details that keep trickling out about Joan Rivers’ unexpected death from complications during an esophageal procedure. Like me, we were in our seventh or eighth decades - virtually the same age as she. I became especially fascinated on realizing that she and I shared more than having been born the same year. We evidently suffered from the same curious psychological malady: `Body Dysmorphic Disorder.’ That’s a dire-sounding mental illness that’s been around – or at least referred to - since the DSM’s (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) first revision in 1980. Yet despite this mutual affliction, we both seemed to have survived without either of us having been done in by this dreadful-sounding disorder.
Joan Rivers
Like most of my friends of a certain age, I’ve been riveted by the details that keep trickling out about Joan Rivers’ unexpected death from complications during an esophageal procedure. Like me, we were in our seventh or eighth decades - virtually the same age as she. I became especially fascinated on realizing that she and I shared more than having been born the same year. We evidently suffered from the same curious psychological malady: `Body Dysmorphic Disorder.’ That’s a dire-sounding mental illness that’s been around – or at least referred to - since the DSM’s (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) first revision in 1980. Yet despite this mutual affliction, we both seemed to have survived without either of us having been done in by this dreadful-sounding disorder.
According to the DSM – what’s often referred to, somewhat sarcastically, as the psychiatric diagnostic `Bible’ - Body Dysmorphia is defined as “a preoccupation with an imaged defect in physical appearance,” or, in the case of an actual, albeit slight, defect, as “an excessive preoccupation” with this shortcoming.
Focusing on this real, or imagined, defect can exert a terrible toll: symptoms, from depression to the curtailing of one’s social, occupational or other areas of functioning, often result.
It was after River’s death, when I watched for the second time the 2010 documentary, A Piece of Work, about this driven, indefatigable icon (who truth to tell, I'd never seen perform live), that I heard what I instantly recognized as an expression of the comedian’s bodily Dysmorphic feelings. “I never thought of myself as a beauty,” she says. “I was never a natural beauty.” Which is why’, she adds, `the first thing she reaches for in the morning is her make up’.
Rivers’ remark is of a piece with other comments she’d shared over the years in her stand-up routines, during her TV interviews, and in the pages of her books: if something – or someone – isn’t perfect, fix it. It’s a sentiment she’d lived by to extremes, (or excess), considering the hundreds of plastic surgery procedures she’d often joked about having undergone. This comment stood out, however because other articles about Rivers, including countless ones which speculated about the causes of her death, she was quoted as having voiced similar negative feelings about herself:
`I was a homely girl;' `I was not a pretty girl;' `when I was a tween, I was fat. Fat fat fat!;' `In spite of dieting, gagging, purging and drinking Ipecac for lunch, I was a chubby girl;’ ‘I was a chubby, not attractive Jewish girl.’
Yet even as she laments, the caustic comic repeatedly drew upon the least appealing physical parts of herself for aspects of her limitless fonts of wit. Indeed, everything from her aging, sagging face, breasts and ear lobes, became grist for, in Freudian terminology, the comedian’s `sublimated’ humor. As she worked a room (or a page) one could see that Rivers’ `shtick’ was just another means which the iconic legend drew on to `fix’ a part of what was `wrong’ or wanting in her flawed self-image.
Following her husband’s suicide in the late 1989’s, which Rivers often said had left her and her daughter, Melissa, destitute – “high and dry” and in need of starting over – she also admits to having spent years as a bulimic. But contrary to the DSM, which describes one’s obsession with food as controlling the person, Rivers characterized those years as having been among her happiest. She recalled that at a time when everything else had felt beyond her control, eating became for her the one area over which she’d felt fully in control.
Pondering Rivers’ experience in what could only translate as having triumphed over her Body Dysmorphic Disorder and/or Bulimia - I thought of another person who has never let her looks get her down: the brilliant writer, Daphne Merkin. In her newly published collection of essays, The Fame Lunches, one stands out for me. In In My Head I Am Always Thin, Merkin writes that despite having packed on far too many pounds than have been good for her appearance or her health since her marriage and pregnancy, she still feels and thinks of herself as the long limbed, beauteous young woman she was growing up – she’s never outgrown the feeling of looking the way she used to look: slim, sexy and infinitely f…kable.
Unlike Merkin, in my own head, despite photos of me as a normal, cute little child, I am forever a chunky, chubby teen, unable to wear the petite pastel dirndls I envied on my middle school friends. And if I’d looked like Rivers did as a youngster you’d have had to drag me up and onto a stage in total mortification. My classmates did have to do just that to get me to perform in my 6th grade play as Jacob Marley’s ghost, lugging my homemade cardboard chain behind me. I’d so longed for one of the few girls’ parts. But Marley’s role was mine. Unlike Rivers – who claims to have never felt so alive as when on stage and performing – there I stood, dying a thousand deaths, all those eyes staring at my clunky, unfeminine, mostly immobilized, unsmiling self.
As I grew older, my chunkiness melted away - everywhere but on my ankles. But in those early years, much like Joan Rivers and Daphne Merkin, I had other things on my mind. In my case, my face.
Some people spend their lives waiting for their ship to come in. I spent mine waiting for my face to come in. When I was young, my teachers, or my parents, would say: “Joanie, you’ve got the kind of face that you’ll grow into.”
I heard this not just from them but from some of my parents’ friends. “Look at her eyes,” one man repeatedly said to my parents. Whenever he and his wife came to a dinner party at our apartment, he’d pull me aside.“ You see those eyes of hers,” he’d tell my parents. “She’s going to have a really beautiful face when she grows up.”
At times, even strangers on the street would stop to look and comment on my eyes.
“What an amazing color of green,” people would say. “With eyes like hers, she’s going to grow up to be a real beauty one of these days!”
I yearned to believe all of them, going one better than The Ugly Duckling who had no such instilled hope to cling to. I’d gaze into the mirror at my greenish hazel eyes and try to envision myself one fine day - beautiful at last. I waited, and I kept waiting, until one not so fine day, it was suddenly many decades later and my once greenish/hazel eyes were now a predominantly bloodshot color. My once rich chestnut colored hair shot with sparks of gold and bronze was a brassy shade of unnatural-looking brunette, thanks to the costly – and often failed attempts - of the series of less than entirely successful beauticians I frequented at six week intervals. Worse, at my every fleeting glance in the mirror, I was greeted by the increasingly unsightly view of a chin melting into a hint of another chin, then disappearing almost into what now passed for my neck, if that’s the word for the hideously corded, striated, bulging protuberance that greeted me. It struck me that while waiting to grow into my face, I’d grown up and was now growing old! My face had docked and sailed away before I’d ever boarded.
Shocked as I was, I’ve become reconciled to being cheated of what I’d come to view as my promised inheritance: the eventual growing into my looks that was one day going to compensate for my years of ugly ducklinghood – of life lived, if not exactly as a homely woman, then certainly as no head turner. At times, such a situation has even had its pluses. Unlike many, if not most, of my aging women friends, since I never had the pleasure of finding my looks, I’ve been spared their exquisite pain of losing them.
Given my near permanent state of expectation, my dating life was fraught from the get-go. I couldn’t expect men to swarm after me because of my looks. And back in my day – way back, if you want to get technical – expecting men to be interested in me because of my brains would have been delusional. It wasn’t just girls wearing glasses, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, who were thought lacking in sex appeal; men, I was warned, typically stared right past straight-A-garnering girls.
Still, somehow I did end up with my fair share of men: a lawyer, an art critic, an artist – more than enough for an entire lifetime. How did I do it? I’d have to say some men claimed I’d wound up with an “interesting” face. Perhaps this was attributed to what has sometimes been described as my “half-smile” – a dead-pan look suggestive of something intriguing hidden beneath the surface. And – a confession. In my early fifties, like several of my turkey-wattle- necked friends, I sprang for a facelift. It removed some of the wattles. But that is now decades old. Unlike Rivers, once was more than enough.
Nevertheless, all this morphing and transforming in mid and late life has left me more than a little puzzled. I didn’t have an image from my own youth to sustain me when I clung to that hope of growing up into a future, better looking me. I was flying blind, just trusting in my eyes to somehow lead me there.
Joan Rivers may not have had such an image either – at least until she saw what wonders make-up could offer. And once sampled, she never looked back. “With enough make-up and enough plastic surgery, there seemed nothing to stop her from out performing her inspiration, Phillis Diller, going on into her late eighties or beyond
Sadly, Rivers didn’t count on her anesthesia, or her vocal cords from reportedly freezing up and betraying her. But maybe she’s lucky. She certainly exited on top. Meanwhile, Daphne Merkin and I plod on, getting older, but staving off the worst of old age’s ravages. Merkin, not just in her head, really is thin again, having lost weight on doctors’ orders; while I still yearn for just one single day with Marlene Dietrich legs the envy of all - and no one on that day who will care anything about my face.
