The wages of beauty are loneliness
Marianne Macdonald says that the crazy bounty nature bestows on gorgeous women can be a curse: a recipe for low confidence and solitary distrust
They all wilted under the world’s scrutiny. Béart lamented once that people just stared when they met her. Certainly, in the warp-speed morphing that occurs when your mental image is confronted by the flesh and blood reality of these women you can be sure three rules will hold true. One is that they will not look at all like their pictures. The second is they will generally look less beautiful. The third is that they will radiate an aura impossible to describe, forged of definiteness and distrust and fear and confidence, and quite intangibly woven from the decadent things they have done, the rich, sophisticated people they have been around, and the crazy bounty nature has bestowed.
Any really famous person shares this same indescribable self-possession. It’s best summed up as a kind of conscious calm. But in these women it ratchets up a notch: their self-possession combines with a wariness and a faint, animal sense of power. And along with all this, confusingly, they are always strangely open and touchingly vulnerable. JLo was striking for her frankness, her unmitigated me-ness and her piercing gaze. She radiated energy and definiteness. Yet she faltered when I asked what quality she would have if she could have any in the world. ‘I’d like to be able to read everyone’s mind,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ she repeated in a smaller, child’s voice. ‘Then I wouldn’t have to wonder about what people are thinking.’ Macpherson added in a bleak observation whose forlornness I never forgot, that the modelling profession was quite ‘ingrate’ — ungrateful. ‘One minute people adore you, the next they can’t remember your name.’
Like Macpherson, Christensen was battle-scarred from being a supermodel: few professions can have such a chasm between their glamorous façade and ugly actuality. In Christensen’s case modelling seemed to have been particularly damaging — in an ultimate irony, it seemed to have trashed her ability to be with a man. ‘Because we’ve lived such an independent lifestyle it’s hard to let someone in and open up,’ she explained to me of this. ‘Because, when you travel and do the job I’ve done for all these years, there’s no routine to any of it.’
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Kevin
January 31st, 2008 8:22pmYou need a control group to test your hypothesis that exceptional beauty makes a woman a loser in the marriage stakes. Secondly, your view of marriage seems implicitly to pre-date Henry VIII. I have no objection to that, but I wonder if non-Catholic women genuinely aspire to lifelong marriage. In other words, is relationship breakdown merely a self-fulfilling philosophy of life? (If you believe marriage is a non-binding commitment, are you likely to make the effort to rationally seek a credible lifelong partner?). Finally, in establishing who is and who is not happily married, one has to bear in mind the observation made by Athenian lawgiver Solon to the fabulously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia, which may be paraphrased as follows: "One can only know if a woman was truly blessed when she is dead", because of course, at any moment up to that point it can all go pear-shaped (as it did for Croesus).
Sheila
January 31st, 2008 10:36pmWhat on earth is this article doing in The Spectator? Did Hello! or People turn it down?
D Short
February 1st, 2008 3:31amThe Spectator continues to go downhill. What a lot of celebrity drivel! How can a formerly serious, witty and well-written magazine publish such puerile trash?
Tim Jenkins
February 2nd, 2008 8:59pmThe previous two comments are endorsed by this one. Oy vey.
Pablo Escobar
February 14th, 2008 11:31amRegardless of whether these beautiful women are temporarily single, or coming out of a "bad" relationship, they are still better off than the ugly people with who will never find a partner. For example, I'm a 20 year old who's never had a gf, and is unlikely to have one due to my lack of good looks and shyness. So the premise of this article is faulty -- you start from the assumption that celebrities are suffering in their relationships, when in fact their lives are a million times better than the average geek. The average geek can only dream of a relationship, whereas these good looking celebrities are just finding it difficult to find the RIGHT KIND of relationship. Big deal.