Just Say No to Makeover, Susan Boyle
Say it ain’t so, Susan.
Susan Boyle, the Queen-size Scottish belter with frizzy hair and muskrat eyebrows, appears to be on her way to a makeover. The 47-year-old spinster, whose stunning rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on “Britain’s Got Talent,” made her a YouTube sensation, has reportedly plunked down $57 for a permanent and an eye-brow waxing.
Next, she’ll be fending off competing offers from NutriSystem and Jenny Craig.
Because that is the way it is with fame, which brooks no truck for the dowdy. In the immortal words of Jules Styne, “If a girl isn’t pretty/like a Miss Atlantic City/she should dump the stage and try another route.”
Not Susan Boyle, who is rumored to be negotiating a record contract after her debut on the gladiatorial “Gong Show.” So incongruous was her commanding voice to her decidedly dowdy appearance, that sneering spectators turned into howling supporters faster than you could say “YouTube.”
Within days, the Washington Post’s Robin Ghivan, who has so little to do now that Hillary Clinton has burned all her V-necks, was insisting that “the ugly duckling” get a makeover.
“The tale of Susan Boyle will not be complete until the shy spinster blossoms,” she wrote. “Those who have been entranced by her story so far should let Boyle’s fairy godmother finish her work.”
Ghivan’s
counsel may seem craven, but anybody who’s seen Sarah Jessica Parker’s high school yearbook knows whereof Ghivan speaks. It’s why 55-year-old Oprah Winfrey looks better than 35-year-old Oprah. On the way up, we like our entertainers to be a little frumpy (think “Second Hand Rose” Barbra Streisand, circa 1963). But we’d like to think that all that fame and fortune actually does something for them, otherwise the whole vicarious thrill goes completely out the window.
What good is the house in Malibu if you can’t have abs like Julianne Michaels?
Dr. Robert Canfield, Professor of Anthology at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has published an academic essay about the Boyle phenomenon, “Susan Boyle And The Power Of The Moral Imagination.” Canfield says Boyle personifies our own doubts about ourselves.
“We can see in her an objectification of what we fear about ourselves,” he told one St. Louis reporter. “So when she comes forth with that voice, that music [Dash] as if we have discovered Judy Garland at the age of 47 [Dash] we are thrilled. She’s going to make it, we think…. And we unconsciously invest ourselves in her achievement.”
Boyle only feeds the fires of indignity when, in a question about the reaction to her success, she tells ABC’s Diane Sawyer, “The ones who were mean to me are now nice to me.”
Oh!
We think. The jerks! Let’s hear them croon “Melancholy Baby.”
One of the most magnificent sopranos of the last century was Australia’s Joan Sutherland, who was nobody’s idea of a beauty, but who almost single-handedly revived the bel canto tradition in opera. Granted, she didn’t have Boyle’s hirsute charms, but she didn’t need Botox either. Most of us, who don’t look like Kristen Chenoweth, and couldn’t come close to sounding like her, want to prove those nasty undermining creeps who don’t see our true worth, wrong. We want to hit that high-C, feel that tape snap across our chest, remember to thank our mothers during the Oscar-acceptance speech.
And we want to look like Eva Mendes doing it. 
It is sobering to think that some of the most exceptional voices of the last century [Dash] Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Mary Martin, Barbara Cook or even Streisand [Dash] might today be stifled because of their possessor’s girdle size. Marni Nixon had a voice like an angel, but only a pleasant, ordinary face. So when it came to finding a Maria to swoon to “West Side Story’s” Tony, producers turned to Natalie Wood and let Nixon play vocal Cyrano. So, too, with Deborah Kerr in “The King and I” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady” [Dash] all Marni Nixon, the ghost singer who had no chance of matching the loveliness of these beauties.
Today, we can enhance voices and surgically manipulate bodies, but to hear the untouched richness of an instrument like Boyle’s voice is a rare and elegant pleasure. She will likely be slenderized, air-brushed, plucked and polished, but I prefer to think of her as she was [Dash] looking just like us [Dash] and sounding anything but.