Anjana Basu

Illusions of Glamour

Maharanis tripping in and out of Maxims with jade cigarette holders long to there, clutching jewelled turtle mascots and trying desperately to look like Edna May or any other currently popular swoon queens. Chiffon saris invented to lend a float of formal sophistication to a woven cotton summer. High heels to teeter on and necessitate a clinging clutch at a male escort’s arm. Sandals very useful for romance, long spiky heels with a touch of glitter in the right places. Respectable women don’t walk in them. Respectable women don’t teeter or clutch. Decent flat footed women glower and think dark thoughts.

“I am fragile. I am a vision you can wear on your arm for a while. You can walk into a room with me and heads will turn.” Chinese women approximated the effect with bound feet, swaying like lilies in the breeze. The greater the sway, the greater the implied, offered, femininity. Enlightenment unbound the feet and found easier ways to sway, but the memory lingered. The slow clink of an anklet couldn’t begin to compete with that combination of authoritative heeltaps and swaying form.

Then came lipstick. ‘Red Hot and Cool’, they called it in the saxophone shadows of Indian nightclubs and they brushed it on for effect. You could tell a woman who’d been around by her brush whittled lipstick, worn down to the bone.

The faster they were, the faster they flicked out their tubes and lipsticked their mouths in their compact reflections, while the men watched in open or discreet admiration and other women, condemned to laws of decency, dragged their feet en route to the Ladies’. Decent women lipsticked their mouths and brushed their hair in powder room intimacy. These things were as intimate as getting ready for bed, meant only for the eyes of a brother or husband. Decent women didn’t lipsticked traces of themselves on the crystal.

But they did it openly in the nightclubs or at the racecourse, in the world of Anglo Indians. And the gossip it caused ! An Anglo Indian beauty with a scarlet mouth under the sweep of a cloche - obviously someone’s governess. Sir So and So’s daughter’s, you know, he went to Oxford, went very brown sahib, his wife’s dead. But then, governesses all had tragic love lives written into the shadows under their eyes. Anyone who looked like that had to have a romantic past lingering somewhere. More so than scrubbed young faces without a blush or a trace of crimson, and candid enquiring eyes that didn’t ambush you from the shadows.

The red mouth was brazen. The red mouth signalled danger. It said STOP and waved a flag at a bull. It stuck out a mile. “Do you close your eyes when you’re kissed ?” asked the Revlon ad copy. Shell shocked women in World War II came round in ambulances and screamed for their lipsticks. “Now I look like myself,” they said to their mirrors, blotting out the strain and the pain. While actresses tried everywhere to perfect the kissproof lipstick - more economical and much better mannered, imagine leaving telltale traces all over the place !

With lipstick went the powder, finely sifted through layers and layers of silk. The answer to the faint gleam of sweat in the nose. “I’m going to powder my nose,” ladies whispered discreetly to their escorts, covering up more urgent necessities with the platitude. The Ladies Room was originally called the Powder Room and stocked cannisters of powder, six inches deep and instantly replaceable, topped with a swansdown puff. The silver powder box became an indispensible part of a bride’s equipment, side by side with the paan daan. Determinedly different ladies imported theirs in porcelain with musical attachments and ballerinas turned on their toes in tinkling time to the sweeps of the puff. The tiny silver shovels that went with them made them handy compact refillers.

In nightclubs and at the big parties they handed out compacts as favours or prizes for dance competitions. Compacts that today would be described as ‘important’ in the pages of high fashion magazines. Flashy squares of mother of pearl, discs of gold, tortoise shell with a little line of diamonds let in. They were meant to be held. They signalled significantly every time they were produced, whether in the darkness of boites, or by chandelier light. Sliding out of velvet and leather pouches. Compacts snapping shut in bursts like abrupt applause in darkened auditoriums or theatre foyers.

The sixties saw Liz Taylor in seven layers of eyeshadow sailing down the Nile to sink Richard Burton - eyes rimmed black and shiny with an eyeliner brush and sad emphasis sitting on the lower lids. Nothing of it was subtle and all of it belonged to the night. Love was adult, forbidden and wrong, without a stray gleam of innocence and highlighted by rouge. And both the wrongness and the scarlet cheeks enhanced the allure and took it three steps out of the bald, bare, everyday world.

Natural was out. Hair was coaxed, teased, bouffant, bee hived and lacquered firmly into place for combat. Madam leaped out of her speeding jeep because her producer driver forgot himself in mid-gear and the incident was the talk of the film studios, but not a single hair of her head was out of place. Women slept sitting up after a single trip to the hairdressers’, even though all Cleopatra did was flip her wig. Filmstars put their hair in a plait over one shoulder for morning shots and back-combed it bouffant at night, with one lock sticking out so.

Behind the screens and the scenes, the make up men worked their magic with their square Leichner boxes and their greasepaint, altering, erasing. Artists in the canvas of the flesh. Glamour is an illusion. The stardust gets into your eyes and stays there.

unframe this page