For an ugly person, I think about beauty quite a lot. I think about it in terms of my memory: “I remember how beautiful Mary was that day.” I think about it in terms of art, in terms of trying to portray with words, paint, or graphite what I think is beauty. What is a beautiful thing, person, sound, moment, feeling.
We all have the same features: two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, a cupid’s bow above a fuller bottom lip, and a neck of some description, yet some of us are beautiful, and some of us are hideous. Who decides?
Carol Burnett is considered funny-looking, but Ann Margaret is considered beautiful. Why? They’re both comic actors, dancers, and singers. They both have red hair and are dappled with freckles like a rhone horse. They’re about the same height, but Ann Margaret weighs about twenty pounds more. It’s not hard to see where she keeps the extra weight. One made America laugh on television for twenty years, and one broke Elvis’s heart. What’s the difference?
Bob Mackie was famous enough as a designer that he chose who his customers were, not the other way around. For several years, Mackie would turn down work from other clients because he was designing and building new costumes every week for his two favorite clients, Cher and Carol Burnett. For a man who changed how the world understood aesthetic beauty, to him, those were the two most beautiful women in Hollywood.
Michael Mitias taught the history of philosophy and aesthetics. He spoke softly, so you had to listen. When he spoke, you really wanted to listen. Dr. Mitias said that, in his treatise entitled “Metaphysics,” Aristotle said, “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.” “definiteness” here means that you get what you expect to get. That’s about as close as I can get with my broken Greek.
Aristotle says that beauty is a matter of symmetry, and if you’re good enough at math, you can predict it. Generations of philosophers and artists have tried to prove him correct. If you’re a painter, though, and if you’ve ever tried to capture someone’s likeness, then you know that nobody is ever really symmetrical, no matter how ugly or beautiful. They may look symmetrical when they’re moving, but once they’re still enough for you to draw, this eye hangs a little lower than that eye. That breast is larger than that one. Why does one hand curl when the other doesn’t? Nobody is symmetrical. According to Aristotle, nobody is beautiful.
Sylvester Stalone and I both have decidedly asymmetrical faces. He’s famous for his beauty, and I’m not famous for anything, but definitely not for beauty. This might distress other men, but honestly, I’ve seen the women that Stalone gets, and I’m good. No, really, we’re square.
Had he actually loved Talia Shire, I might have felt differently, but no, they were just friends. Shire played Adrian Balboa six times. The point of her character is that everyone thought she was ugly, but Rocky believed in her, so her beauty came out. There’s even a point in the film where a character tells Rocky to take her to the zoo because he heard “retards like the zoo.” I was called retard a lot as a child, and yeah, I loved the zoo. Maybe he was right.
To me, nobody in Hollywood was as beautiful as Talia Shire. She played Connie Corleone three times. In The Godfather, I always felt like Michael got what he deserved. Fredo got what he deserved. Connie though, Connie was an innocent, and all the things her family put her through destroyed that innocence. I suppose that’s the point.
She got the part of Adrian Balboa because her brother was Francis Ford Coppola, and having her in the movie meant it got financed. Stalone wanted Carrie Snodgress to play Adrian. She was very blonde and beautiful, but have you ever heard of her?
They called Lon Chaney the “Man of A Thousand Faces.” Nine hundred and ninety-five of them were ugly. Chaney probably knew more about ugly than anyone in history. Chaney was an actor, but he was famous for his makeup work. Unlike today’s makeup artists, Chaney didn’t have access to foam latex or silicone prosthetics. He had to build his face fresh every day. He used wires and tapes to contort the facial features and elaborate dentures to change the shape of the mouth and jaw. Years ago, I bought a ring from Forest Ackerman shaped like a spider. Its thorax opens up to reveal a tiny dab of makeup from Chaney’s makeup kit. I can’t wear it, but I keep it as my talisman.
Only one of Chaney’s creations had an intentionally asymmetrical face. That was Quasimodo. Chaney did his best to create a look for Quasimodo that matched the book. Victor Hugo described Quasimodo as a giant of a man, broken down by his hunchback with a great wart covering one eye. The point of the novel is that despite his ugliness, Quasimodo is the only beautiful man in it. He uses his brutish ugliness to rescue Esmerelda, who then abandons him, leaving him alone among the gargoyles of Notre Dame, lamenting, “oh, why was I not made of stone like thee?”
It’s easy for me to find beauty. When it’s a person, I try to find ways to tell them, if not with words, with some other means, a touch, a look, maybe a sketch.
When I first started to recover my strength from rehab, a woman I loved many years ago but hadn’t seen since then came to see me. “I won’t look the same.” She warned me. “I bet you will,” I replied.
I know that I am ugly. I always was. Now that I’m old, you can tell that I always treeted my body as if nothing could hurt it, and for a while, nothing could, but that didn’t last.
We sat on a bench in the night air, holding hands like the last thirty-five years hadn’t happened. I touched her face. “You look the same,” I said. I don’t think she believed me.
I can’t tell you what is beautiful and what is ugly. If you look at my drawings and my pitiful words, you’ll see that I’ve been trying to work this out for quite a long time. Michael Mitias spent his life trying to understand aesthetics. He was actually famous around the world for it. He was light years smarter than I am, but I don’t think he figured it out either.
A red bird is singing outside my window. That’s beautiful. There’s a red scar on my finger where I cut it. That’s ugly. I’ll keep working on this and get back to you.
Great column. For what it's worth, I would not describe you as "ugly."