Americans have long been fascinated by the personal lives of Hollywood celebrities and the over-hyped magic of plastic surgery. In this entertaining memoir, Dr. Norman Leaf, a highly respected plastic surgeon, reveals the complex and all-too-human connection that exists between these two worlds. In his thirty-five years practicing in Beverly Hills, California, Leaf has encountered the great and those aspiring to be great, seeing them in a different light than the general public. This unique perspective contributes to a touching, inspiring, humorous, and eye-opening journey into a world few have the opportunity to see close-up, while debunking the myths and clearing up the misconceptions about plastic surgery. Are Those Real? is not a kiss-and-tell memoir. With the exception of a few iconic figures, Leaf is careful to protect the identities of his patients. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, Are Those Real? paints an intimate portrait of a master surgeon, while shining a light into a little-known corner of modern culture. In this memoir, Leaf appeals to biography buffs and illustrates the good, bad, happy, and just plain funny aspects of plastic surgery.
ARE THOSE REAL?
TRUE TALES OF PLASTIC SURGERY FROM BEVERLY HILLSBy NORMAN LEAFiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Norman Leaf, MD
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-1840-5Contents
DEDICATION......................................................................vINTRODUCTION....................................................................1CHAPTER ONE The Road to Hollywood..............................................4CHAPTER TWO The Unique Joys of Practicing in Beverly Hills.....................33CHAPTER THREE Beverly Hills House Calls........................................43CHAPTER FOUR Are Those Real?...................................................70CHAPTER FIVE I Knew There'd Be Days Like This..................................89CHAPTER SIX Face-Lifts.........................................................111CHAPTER SEVEN When Is Too Much Not Enough?.....................................120CHAPTER EIGHT Not Just a Pretty Face...........................................142EPILOGUE Reflections...........................................................154ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................157ABOUT THE AUTHOR Norman Leaf, MD, FACS.........................................159
Chapter One
THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD
* How I Got Here
A screen memory: I was about nine years old when my father brought home our first television, a round-screen black-and-white Philco. We lived in a modest apartment on the south side of Chicago, and my parents felt that the best place to put the TV set was in the corner of the dining room rather than a coveted site in the living room near the plastic slipcovered sofa. By default, my favorite place to watch television became the cozy space beneath the dining room table. I would lie on my stomach with my hands supporting my head, my legs outstretched around the central table legs that were designed to pull apart if the table was lengthened for large dinner parties. In this position, I watched my favorite shows: Captain Video, Garfield Goose, Howdy Doody, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. And there was one other iconic image that became permanently embedded in my consciousness.
One day each year, my attention was riveted on a real-world event. On New Year's Day, while there was frozen, dirty snow piled up over the curbs and the frost on the windows was too thick to see through, the Rose Parade was broadcast from Pasadena directly into my heart. There was sunshine, mountains, flowers, beautiful blond girls, and convertibles. For a young boy accustomed to the frequently grim, confining cityscape of Chicago, the lure of California was irresistible. Somehow I knew that when I grew up, I would move to California, buy a convertible, and marry a blond.
It was that simple.
Around that time, I began to inquire what my father did for a living. He told me he worked as an engineer at Leaf Brands, Inc., a large manufacturer of candy and gum in Chicago. He explained that he didn't drive a train. No, he was the kind of engineer who worked at fixing things, especially the big machines used in the making of candy and gum. I would overhear him talking to his friends over a card game about a confounded new machine the company was buying and how it kept breaking down. All I knew for sure was that he would come home from work every day smelling of bubble gum, carrying boxes of gumballs and Whoppers and uncut sheets of baseball cards-how bad could that be? I knew at that point that I, too, would be an engineer when I grew up.
It made sense that a career in fixing things might be in my future because of an event that had happened several years earlier, when I was seven years old. My parents were away for a few days, and I was staying with my grandmother. I opened the closet door, and the doorknob came off in my hand. I was afraid I had broken something and hesitantly showed it to my grandmother, who reassured me that it happened all the time and that one day she would have it fixed.
I looked at the doorknob and then at the spindle remaining in the door. Clearly, the knob slipped over the spindle, but how did it stay attached? I noticed there was a little screw on the side of the knob overlying the point at which the spindle entered the knob. I borrowed a screwdriver from my grandma's tool drawer and tightened the screw and voil! the knob was securely attached to the door again.
My grandmother nearly plotzed. What a genius! Only seven years old, and already he's fixing the doorknob! She called my mother long-distance, and my mother started crying with pride. Never mind that Mozart had written umpteen concertos by that age: I had fixed a doorknob! I was beaming. I had done something helpful with my hands, and all the important women in my life were now terribly proud of me. Was it a portent of things to come? Perhaps I, too, destined to become an engineer, fix things, and make women happy.
* Rich Leafs, Other Leafs
The owners of the candy company had the same last name as we did, and my father told me they were distant cousins. He never was able to explain exactly how we were related, saying that it all got muddied up by the fact that all of them had been born in Russia and immigrated to the United States around 1914. My mother said that they were "high society," that they traveled to Europe and drove fancy cars. "They are the rich Leafs," she said. Even a seven-year-old could figure what that meant for us.
A few years ago, a woman from Palm Springs came to see me for consultation. She asked if I were related to the Leafs of the candy company. I said that I was, but explained that I never knew the exact connection. She said that Minnie Leaf, the aged widow of one of the founding Leafs, lived next door to her in Palm Springs and was her friend. She returned two weeks later with Minnie, age ninety-six, in tow.
I hadn't seen or spoken to Minnie in many years, but I remembered quite fondly. She had always been gracious and interested in my life, and had flown to Detroit from Chicago to attend my wedding (first one). She said she knew the answer to the mystery of our relationship.
"We aren't related," she said sweetly. She explained that her long- deceased husband had emigrated on the same boat from Europe to New York with my grandfather and his young family and that they all became friends playing pinochle during the crossing. They had never met before, and they had similar but not identical last names (Lifschutz and Lifschitz). They all had their names changed to Leaf when they arrived at Ellis Island.
At that moment, a feeling of liberation swept over me. My family was no longer the poor Leafs. We were just other Leafs!
* High School Musical
School was always easy for me. The public school system in Chicago at that time was still in pretty good shape. The teachers were motivated. Classes were usually interesting, and there was plenty of art and science to learn. Students who went to private schools were usually thought of as problem kids. The concept of privilege really didn't enter into my consciousness.
I liked school in general, but I would take any opportunity to blame some nonlethal disease as an excuse to stay home and play or watch television. I soon became interested in reading books, listening to music, making model cars, and watching more television. I took years of piano lessons, practiced when I had to, and found myself coasting through school with ease.
I found that I was pretty good at playing the piano in elementary school. I played at recitals and classroom talent shows, and I became quite friendly with some really talented young musicians. In high school I parlayed my musical interests into a regular gig with a small combo-the kind that played at parties, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. We played from "fake books," ring-bound notebooks with bootleg pages in them, which were probably illegal, though everyone used them. All we needed was the melody line and the chord, and we could "fake it" from there. Piano was my instrument, and I developed some skill at arranging, writing out the notes for the others in the band on blank tablature paper.
Most of my arrangements were simply "covers" for some of the popular recordings of the day. Originality was not a valued commodity at that point. Sounding good and not getting fired was the important thing. Later in my senior year, when I started pairing with a string bass player who loved jazz, I found that a good solid foundation in music theory and proficiency was requisite to being a jazz musician. I had to learn the essentials before I could become really creative, a lesson basic to any art form. I later discovered that this concept could also be applied to the practice of plastic surgery, for a surgeon must know the science, the anatomy, and the surgical skills before he can work on creating something of beauty.
I loved high school. It was a time when incredible optimism and unquestioned patriotism prevailed throughout the country. It was the Eisenhower era, postwar and pre-Vietnam. We all truly believed we could achieve anything we set our hearts on.
Of all my memories, the one I recall most vividly is of that day in the spring of 1957 when Life magazine came to South Shore High School and, for some reason that remains inexplicable, chose me to exemplify the typical American high school student. They planned to compare me to a typical Russian high school student. Sputnik had just become the first Earth-orbiting satellite, to worldwide acclaim. The newspapers (remember them?) were crying out that we had lost the space race to the Soviets.
The goal of the Life piece was to refute the popular notion that the American high schooler had a superior education. They were daring to consider that if the United States was losing the space race to the Soviets, it might mean that education in that godless, Russkie, Communist abyss might actually be even better than ours. But somewhere during the course of prepping the article, they found out that I was not your average American student, that I was a pretty smart feller, that my father had actually been born in Russia, and, perhaps most disconcerting for the Luce organization, that I was Jewish. It would be much better from their point of view to show a more typical student.
Nonetheless, I had been picked, and for one glorious day, Stan Wayman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, followed me everywhere with his retinue of assistants. I suddenly was the most popular guy in the school. Everyone wanted to sit with me in the lunchroom, and classmates who never talked to me were accompanying me down the hall to my classrooms while the cameras clicked and whirred around us. Those smugly unapproachable girls were now shyly approaching me! Heady wine, indeed. I was The Man!
In the end, they picked another school and another student, one who might have been a model for a character from the TV show Happy Days, and I regrettably was once again just a boy. The article was a success, and it might well have stimulated the huge surge in science education in the United States that followed. As a consolation prize, they sent me some 11x14 photos, which I have in a box somewhere in my garage. The cruelty of fate: on that one day, my fifteen minutes of fame, I was wearing my nerdy ROTC uniform. It still embarrasses me.
* Michigan: Music or Medicine
My college experience at the University of Michigan was everything it was supposed to be: living away from my parents, making friends with people whom I never would have met in my own neighborhood, getting drunk once or twice, and most memorably, falling in love and discovering the world of sexual intimacy. I was a living, breathing coming-of-age movie. It was the best time of my life. I also was getting an amazing education.
I think that most college freshmen who claim to know exactly what they want to do when they grow up find that their eventual career choices have little to do with their original plans. I did not have a clearly defined career goal at that time. In retrospect, I see that I must have had some sort of a plan, but at the time it seemed like a random choice. I signed up for a premed curriculum, with a minor in music. Medicine could be a good "fallback" option.
I pledged a fraternity and moved into the house my second year. As was typical of fraternities, many of the members came from wealthy families. Others of us did not. We worked as waiters in the house to help defray our living expenses. I felt no sense of social stigma. We were all brothers, and in fact living among the wealthier guys became yet another part of my education.
They were very much into elegant young men's fashion, which meant that more than a few of them had a new wardrobe every fall. I learned about which way the stripes on a rep tie should go, the difference between Ivy League and "Continental" styles, and the fact that a gentleman should never allow a pale hairy leg to show over the top of his socks while he was sitting down. It was long socks with garters or nothing.
Looking back at it now, it's hard not to laugh at this absurd, slavish conformity to a presumably sophisticated style of dress, but those observations weren't completely irrelevant after all. In fact, my interest in how consumers perceive fashion served me well some twenty-five years later when my wife and I owned and operated the Prada boutique in Beverly Hills.
In truth, I lived between two worlds in college, and both were linked by music. I was mostly in synch with the fraternity-sorority thing, my strongest contributions being primarily musical and theatrical. I was the "sing" leader, meaning I led the brothers in rehearsals and serenades when a member became pinned to a girl. I also made a 16mm sound movie for our fraternity-sorority team, one that won first place in the Michigras Spring Festival competition.
The other world was decidedly less Greek and more geek. This was the early '60s just before the Flower Power revolution, and the folk music genre was in full swing. I joined with three other non-Greek (read hippie) friends to form a folk quartet at the University of Michigan. Our instruments were diverse: guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, autoharp, Hobo Joe (an odd-looking string bass made from an inverted washtub and a broomstick)-anything that someone in Appalachia, Mississippi, the Caribbean, and even Tudor England might have played, we played. We sang country songs, union songs, drinking songs, protest songs, love songs, and blues. We performed at festivals and almost anywhere we could find a place away from a classroom.
We even performed at fraternity and sorority parties. The odd juxtaposition of beer-swilling fraternity guys and cashmere-sporting sorority girls singing along enthusiastically to "We Shall Overcome" in a house that was definitely off-limits to most minorities remains a bemused memory to me.
Many times after curfew, which was 10:30 pm during the week, we stationed ourselves outside the women's dorms. Fortified against the cold Michigan winter by ill-begotten beer, we sang exuberantly up toward the high-rise windows. We found for our opening number (which was sometimes our closing number if campus security so willed it) that the unmuffled sound of a long-necked, five-string banjo was the best for getting the attention we sought. The girls would fling open their windows and yell requests. They would sometimes pitch their bras or other undergarments down as encouragement. It was an easy way for a shy guy to get the attention of girls.
In the summer of 1961, we traveled around the country in an old VW camper, singing for our supper at various dives and hotels. Over the Fourth of July weekend in Yellowstone National Park, we went table to table in the bar of the Old Faithful Inn, playing requests. We sang "Tom Dooley" over and over until the inherent corniness of it overcame us. I began to understand the difficulties faced by performers with one major hit. For the rest of their performing lives, that would be the one song that they would have to sing every time. Making it sound sincere and fresh each time would be the true test of their abilities.
One of our stops was Kalisa's, a little restaurant on Monterey's Cannery Row, which had a showroom upstairs. Kalisa herself was a big, warmhearted gypsy/hippie woman who loved musicians. She listened to our audition, then offered us dinner and a small room in back to bunk in for the night. We were to be the opening act for her "headliner" that evening. We accepted graciously.
The headliner was a genuine itinerate folksinger/guitarist, not some college boys on a lark for the summer. He was a world-weary weather-beaten man who had actually ridden the rails, who lived out of a small kit bag, and whose guitar was his entire life. He sang his songs from years of experience on the road, not from recordings. He spoke very little about his past, and didn't care to know anything about ours. He was the real article. He also never went anywhere without a pint of whiskey in his hip pocket.
It turned out that we were all sharing the room in back, and our headliner made it clear pretty quickly that he had the single bunk, and that he was suspicious of anyone who wasn't interested in destroying themselves by alcohol abuse. To gain his respect, we all took requisite sips from his passed bottle of Jim Beam, bluffed our manly pleasure over it, and did a few warm-up songs with him in the room before the performance.
We did the show and watched his performance: he half-talked, half-sang songs that he drew convincingly from his soul. It was a riveting experience, and made us more aware than ever that we were only pretenders. We all retired to our quarters where there was more pickin' and singin', and more Jim Beam. We were pulling out all our musical performing tricks to gain his admiration and validation. We knew we were pretty hot, and we felt we were opening his eyes to our young enthusiasm and stylistic arrangements.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ARE THOSE REAL?by NORMAN LEAF Copyright © 2010 by Norman Leaf, MD. Excerpted by permission.
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