Hollywood's worst-kept secret

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When the BBC goes to Hollywood tonight it gets very excited to discover a few things that most people have known about Tinseltown since the advent of the talkies.

Hollywood, a narrator conspiratorially tells us, is "the home of beautiful people," it celebrates "youth, beauty and glamour," in show business "your face is your fortune".

And many of those bankable faces, we're told, have ... gasp ... "resorted to the surgeon's blade."

Tonight "the story of the myth of Hollywood glamour" will be revealed.

Hollywood Knives titillates with a list of the big names whose plastic surgery the programme is going to reveal: John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra. Even Marilyn Monroe, "that icon of beauty and sexuality", went under the knife to have her receding chin fixed.

The doco finds a doctor who has Marilyn's plastic surgery records and has kept them "I guess out of curiosity". My guess is that he kept them so that he could claim some bizarre sort of connection with a famous dead person through tattling about their private medical records.

For all these very wealthy doctors' claims of well-kept secrets and stories of stars arriving for surgery in the small hours of the morning, it's amazing (or not) how plastic surgery is the worst-kept secret in show business. The villains here are not the movie stars who gave into studio pressure to get a little nose bob, or the ageing stars who want their jowls tucked up behind their ear lobes. The nasty guys are the quacks who take the money and blab.

The saddest story of this tawdry collection of stories is that of Lana Turner in her 60s. She went to a plastic surgeon, pulled out a photograph and said, "I want to look like this." The photograph was of her younger self.

Or perhaps it's the story of Mrs Gabor, mother of Eva and Zsa Zsa. At the age of 80 she booked herself in for yet another facelift. She told the surgeon, who now tells us, that if she died on the operating table, he should finish the job - so that she'd make a beautiful corpse.

Hollywood Knives hasn't managed to find a movie star who will let them sit in on an operation (surprise, surprise.) They have managed to find Susan, a 53-year-old former model who is about to spend US$25,000 in an attempt to restore her face to former glory. She is driven, she says, "not only by my own vanity ... but by peer pressure." I was driven to fast-forward through the gruesome bits.

Hollywood Knives is padded out with more gauze than it takes to hold your face together after a session under the knife. Marilyn's film career and sad decline is wheeled out again. So are Gary Cooper's old film clips. So is a plastic surgeon's wife who is a very, very tragic advertisement for her hubby's art.

It has a stab at casting the blame: is this all the fault of Hollywood's obsession with youth culture? Well, says Carrie Fisher, who wants to watch old people kiss?

The real question is: who wants to watch people of any age have their hairlines peeled back?

* Hollywood Knives, TV3, 8.30pm