A Little Lift: Good for Body and Soul?

To my readers: during the month of April, Beverly in Movieland will temporarily take on a new look. Brave soul that I am, I’ve committed to participating in an A to Z Challenge. That means I’ll be blogging daily (except Sundays), with each post representing a different letter of the alphabet. In the interest of preserving what’s left of my sanity, I’ll make my daily posts somewhat shorter than what you’re used to seeing. Roger Corman fans might enjoy knowing that  I plan to focus on the inside stories of people from the Roger Corman world. As always, requests are welcome.  I do hope you enjoy the change – and tell your friends!  

Seems as though the latest Hollywood beauty fad is the so-called “Vampire Face Lift.” Doctors all over Beverly Hills are drawing syringes full of their patients’ own blood to inject into unsightly wrinkles. It may sound ghoulish, but what’s good enough for Kim Kardashian can’t be wrong, can it?

Perhaps women all across America are engaged in self-improvement projects involving their chins, their chests, and their flabby thighs. I wouldn’t know. I can only report on what’s happening here in Los Angeles, where almost everyone wants to look like a movie star. Leaving my dentist’s office last week, I was struck by the name emblazoned on the door of a nearby office suite; “Make You Perfect.” Perfection seems to be what’s expected in my hometown. After all, this is the place that spawned the Barbie Doll. And where actresses emerging from their teens are routinely expected to sign up for breast augmentation surgery. That aspect of Mary McDonough’s 2011 memoir, Lessons from the Mountain: What I Learned from Erin Walton, haunts me still . . . and I know she’s not alone.

We’ve all heard something about the disasters caused by plastic surgeons run amok. Just think of the eerily chiseled features of Joan Rivers and the late Phyllis Diller. Her own bad experience following a so-called boob job led actress Sally Kirkland to turn activist. In 1998 she founded the Kirkland Institute for Implant Survival Syndrome, and fought the good fight against the FDA’s approval of gel implants after a fourteen-year ban. Others go the legal route. The wife of one noted Hollywood producer was so horrified by the results of her Botox injections that she sued her dermatologist. News of the trial was splashed all over the front page of the Los Angeles Times, thus calling wide attention to her dissatisfaction with her own looks.

Composer-lyricist Billy Barnes, himself an L.A. native, passed from the scene last year. But he was razor-sharp circa 1990 when he penned “A Little Lift” for actress Jane A. Johnston. I heard this comic paean to the wonders of cosmetic surgery a few weeks ago, as part of Bruce Kimmel’s delightful Kritzerland salute to Barnes. (Such pillars of 1950s show biz as Jackie Joseph, Tom Hatten,  Susan Watson, and Karen Sharpe Kramer were in attendance.) “A Little Lift” was belted out by the droll Susanne Blakeslee, who graphically explained how “a laser beam, an acid peel, a wedge of silicone” can improve a gal’s – or a guy’s – outlook on life. Her advice to those of us contemplating the way Time has ravaged our faces: “Raise the brow, and hoist the chin/ If it’s too tight, of course, you have that constant grin./ You hide the scars beneath the hair/ They mustn’t lift too much or one could look like Cher!” 

Fortunately for my readers, Kimmel has made an earlier Blakeslee rendition of this ditty available on YouTube. Enjoy!

Andy Williams and Billy Barnes: My Memories of Two Huckleberry Friends

OK, so I didn’t know either Andy Williams or Billy Barnes very well. And I’m as baffled as anyone by the meaning of the phrase “my huckleberry friend” in Williams’ signature tune, “Moon River.” But the almost simultaneous passing last week of two major musical talents led me to remember that I’d spent instructive hours with both of them. I doubt all three of us were after the same rainbow’s end, but both men (like me) loved show biz and the sound of music.

Billy Barnes wasn’t a household name, especially if you grew up far from Los Angeles.
I first heard about him from my parents: he was the originator of several 1950s hit musical revues with titles like Billy Barnes’ L.A. that played for months at small Hollywood theatres, then traveled briefly to the Big Apple. The young and perky performers, most of them Barnes’ former UCLA classmates, included such talents as Ken Berry, Bert Convy, Joyce Jameson (to whom he was briefly married), and Jackie Joseph (soon to make her mark as the original, adorable Audrey in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors). Another Barnes discovery, Jo Anne Worley, helped Billy get involved with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. He also contributed comic songs to The Danny Kaye Show, and wrote for such TV stars as Goldie Hawn and Cher. Though his specialty was topical satire, his best-known song may be the poignant “Have I Stayed too Long at the Fair,” as recorded by Barbara Streisand.

I visited Billy in his colorful Laurel Canyon home in 1981, for a magazine profile. My editor had warned me that my piece had better be funny. In conversation, though, Billy was not a wit. His charm was low-key: I enjoyed his still-boyish enthusiasm for Old Hollywood, stage musicals (he’d amassed a huge pile of old theatre programs), and tap-dancing. Not to mention his affection for the subject of one of his songs, a now-vanished L.A. emporium called the Akron,where you could buy anything from a can of buffalo chili to a tiki god. (“I MUST have a tiki god!”) It’s hard for me now to think of Billy Barnes fading out with Alzheimer’s prior to his death at age 85.

My Andy Williams memory is quite different. It was 1970, and I was a guide in the U.S. Pavilion at Osaka’s Expo 70, where moon-landing memorabilia and souvenirs of American life were drawing record crowds. Andy back then was the hugely popular star of his own TV variety show. One day in May I was asked to escort him and comic Bill Dana (whose heavily accented “José Jimenez” comedy would never pass muster today) through our exhibit. Making small talk, I asked Andy how Los Angeles was looking these days. “Well,” he said, “Last week they burned down UCLA.” I didn’t believe him, of course, but I quickly realized he wasn’t just trying to be flip. His Expo visit took place shortly after the tragedy of Kent State, where students protesting the Vietnam War were shot dead by members of the Ohio National Guard. In the wake of Kent State, young people went on strike at campuses across the nation. And Andy, a good friend of Senator Robert Kennedy, had been present two years earlier when Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullet at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel. Some recent reports about Williams’ politics have confused me (it’s said he was a lifelong Republican). But I don’t blame anyone in May 1970 for feeling bitter and confused about his country and its inhabitants.

May Billy and Andy rest in peace.