In Our Prime (13 page)

Gertrude Atherton's bestselling novel
Black Oxen,
published in 1923, captures the widespread fear of midlife's physical waning and the promise of science to cure it.
The book tells the story
of the stunning and mysterious Countess Zattiany, whose sudden appearance in New York provokes whispers because of her uncanny resemblance to a fashionable society figure who sailed for Europe thirty years earlier. Zattiany, it turns out, is actually the 58-year-old Mary Ogden, restored to her youth and vigor through scientific rejuvenation treatments discovered in Vienna. The book's title comes from the 1912 play
The Countess Cathleen
by William Butler Yeats: “The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.”

Atherton—an arresting beauty with
a tumble of blond hair, a triangular nose, and a smooth neck that she liked to display with off-the-shoulder dresses—was obsessed with maintaining her looks. At 19, she stole a suitor whom her 37-year-old mother hoped to marry, George H. P. Atherton, a charming 24-year-old wastrel. Years later, she described the incident as “the old story of youth calling to youth against the declining charms of middle-age.” After eleven years of George's failing businesses, frequent moves, and gambling losses, Gertrude was relieved when he traveled to Chile to seek a fortune in 1877. A few weeks later, he was dead after hemorrhaging from a kidney stone and returned home doubled over in a barrel of rum. Freed from the confines of a conventional marriage, Atherton became a journalist and an author. Of the sixty books she wrote,
Black Oxen
was her
most famous. Her friend, the novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, called it “a book for flappers to laugh at, for middle-aged women to weep over, and for really aged ladies to be thankful for.”

A year after its publication, Hollywood turned the book into a film, with Clara Bow as the sweet-faced young seductress and the stunning silent-film star Corinne Griffith as the middle-aged European countess. Atherton's tale is fictional, but it was inspired by her own experience with youth-enhancing techniques developed by the most celebrated hormone researcher of the day, Eugen Steinach, at his exclusive spa.
Like Brown-Séquard before him
, Steinach believed that a dissipation of sperm was responsible for the body's overall decline as men aged. His solution was to perform a vasectomy. By sealing off the passageway through which sperm traveled from the testes, he believed he could build up the concentration of male hormone and “reactivate the entire endocrine system and organism.” Fertility was the trade-off for male potency. (Yeats subjected himself to a Steinach rejuvenation treatment in a British clinic in 1934.) To stimulate more hormone production in women, Steinach repeatedly exposed their ovaries to X-rays. On Central Park West, the procedures were offered by Harry Benjamin, a German endocrinologist who regularly traveled to Vienna to study with Steinach. Benjamin, who lived to 101, was ultimately best known for coining the word “transsexualism” to refer to patients who were convinced their bodies had betrayed their true nature. Introduced by the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to a young man who insisted he was a woman, Benjamin later performed the first sex-change operation in America.
In the 1950s, he counseled
the British writer Jan Morris about a sex-change operation, saying: “If we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction.” Although the context is different, that same advice applies to rejuvenation efforts undertaken by those in midlife. Altering the body to create an identity or fulfill a desire is commonplace today, but this notion took root in the twenties with rejuvenation treatments and plastic surgery.

Benjamin believed in the efficacy of Steinach's practice of giving men vasectomies to concentrate their hormones and zapping women's ovaries with X-rays to stimulate them. One patient said his eyesight improved,
another claimed his bald head grew a thick thatch of hair. The same year
Black Oxen
appeared, Freud went under Steinach's knife in the hope it would stave off his painful oral cancer and reinvigorate him.

Some of Steinach's critics
suggested the effects were all psychological, that he had simply freed his patients from society's view that aging was inevitably linked with decline. But Benjamin remained enthusiastic.
After examining a handful
of Steinach's patients, in 1921 Benjamin wrote up an assessment of the Viennese physician's procedures for the Academy of Medicine that was reported in the
New York Times
: “Dr. Benjamin was of the opinion that the Steinach discovery was one of the most scientifically founded.”
As soon as Atherton read it
, she sought out the doctor. While the treatments, long discredited, make for cringe-worthy reading today, Atherton was a gloriously satisfied customer, claiming that the eight treatments over a period of three weeks gave her renewed energy as well as smoother skin. She became an ardent fan of Dr. Benjamin's, and her book was read not only as a juicy romance in gilded New York but also as a promotional tract for the method.

“
Poor Dr. Benjamin! I nearly ruined him
,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Women besieged him, imploring him to give them the treatment free of charge or at a minimum price. It was the first time they had seen a ray of light in a future menaced with utter fatigue and the clutching of young hands at the jobs that were wearing them out.” Not that Atherton blamed them. “We live in an age of scientific marvels,” she declared, “and those who do not take advantage of them are fools and deserve the worst that malignant Nature can inflict upon them.” For decades afterward, Atherton continued to get letters from middle-aged housewives and working women desperate to be let in on this supposed cure.

A decade after Atherton published
Black Oxen,
C. P. Snow presented a much darker vision of rejuvenation in his anonymously published 1933 novel
New Lives for Old
.
Here, two scientists discover
how to synthesize a rejuvenating hormone called collophage. Initially hailed as a miracle drug, it ends up sowing bitter social tensions in Britain between those who can afford treatment and those who can't, between older workers who refuse to retire and younger ones unable to get jobs, between mothers and daughters who vie for the same young men. The mania for collophage
results in an underground market that causes malpractice and death. Finally, the poor riot and overthrow the government.

As negative views of midlife spread in the twenties, rejuvenation was frequently seen as a means of preserving the upper classes from the deleterious effects of aging.
Steinach believed his treatments
were a boon for the “intellectual class.” Benjamin shared his bias, reporting happily in 1925 that among his patients “the intelligent class predominates by far”—doctors, writers, businessmen, professors, and lawyers. They were also, not coincidentally, the ones who could afford such elective treatments.

The major glands in the body were identified in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, advances in organic chemistry enabled scientists to synthesize inexpensive versions of the sex hormones.
Hormone therapy could claim
impressive accomplishments, curing or treating debilitating diseases like cretinism and diabetes. To some practitioners, hormones held limitless potential to solve nearly every physiological, psychological, and behavioral malady—or, rather, what they considered to be maladies, including aging. Hormones secreted by the reproductive organs in men and women were thought to cause physical and mental decline, including hair loss, senility, decreasing libido, nervous exhaustion, and more. A hormonal imbalance was widely believed to cause homosexuality, and many psychologists blamed hormones for psychosis. Male endocrinologists and those in related fields defined what was “normal” and “deviant” in terms of glandular functions.

The most extravagant claims proved false, but in the coming decades hormone supplements would form the spine of a colossal antiaging industry built around middle-aged men and women.

Rejuvenation aimed to restore the physical condition of youth, while the rudimentary field of plastic surgery attempted to simulate its appearance. If middle age was defined by the body, then perhaps modifying the body could keep middle age at bay.

Few people underwent plastic surgery in these early years, but
its adoption by physicians illustrates important themes that relate to perceptions of midlife: a fundamental expansion of the medical profession's very purpose, from preventing illness to promoting happiness, and the conviction that happiness can be attained through physical improvement.

Remolding a person's features for aesthetic purposes, which began in the late nineteenth century, initially elicited mixed feelings that revealed underlying anxieties about class and race. Elites were already disturbed by how burgeoning consumerism permitted people to mask their social origins by buying the outward trappings of a higher caste. Surgeons who performed nose jobs were welcomed for facilitating personal transformation and contentment, yet they were also considered suspect for enabling people to “pass” as something other than what they were—a syphilitic with a disfigured nose as a healthy man, a black trying to pass as white, or a Jew pretending to be a Christian.
Reviewing the history of
plastic surgery in
Making the Body Beautiful,
the cultural critic Sander Gilman connects its growth to assumptions that race and physical appearance were outward signs of intelligence and worth, a Dorian Gray's–eye view of the world.
After Darwin, the nineteenth-century
criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Alphonse Bertillon, and the psychologist Frances Galton (Darwin's cousin and the founder of the new “science of eugenics”) created classification systems to identify immigrants, criminals, and the insane according to their facial features.
Lombroso, who treated crime
as a disease with a biological component, described murderers as having straight aquiline noses “like the beak of a bird of prey”; rapists were identifiable by their “bushy eyebrows”; and counterfeiters by their small eyes and large noses.
Later Alexis Carrel, who gained fame
with his immortal chicken heart, became a staunch eugenicist and admirer of Hitler. He wanted to extend life as a way of protecting the white race against its inferiors.

Industrial consumer society's preoccupation with physical appearance did not necessarily lead to unsavory philosophies, but it was at odds with the values of character and self-discipline widely promoted for much of the nineteenth century. School lessons and Sunday sermons praised self-sacrifice. Inner virtue was said to be valued above outer beauty (whether people acted on their principles is another question).
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1846 story
“The Birth-Mark,” a scientist's desire to rid his
wife of a reddish birthmark on her cheek ends in her death. In Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
(1868), Amy is chastised for being overly concerned with the shape of her nose; such vanity is seen as a moral defect.

Fabulously popular success manuals emphasized this familiar old-fashioned morality and tied it to flourishing in life. “
Keep in mind the great
truth that you are forming a character for eternity,” Harvey Newcomb wrote in
How to Be a Lady: A Book for Girls
(1850), which contained useful hints on the development of character.
William Mathews, an English professor
at the University of Chicago, reminded men to be true to thine own selves in his 1872 tract
Getting on in the World; or, Hints on Success in Life.
“Blow some kind of a trumpet, or at least a penny whistle to draw the world's eye on you; but be sure that you are what you pretend to be, before you blow . . .” or “woe be unto you!”
Orison Swett Marden, an unflagging
motivational author, published
Character: The Grandest Thing in the World
in 1899. Wanting to improve one's character was “the highest ideal,” he wrote, and ultimately the foundation for a happy and successful life. “True worth is in being, not seeming,” he reminds readers, “inner character eventually out-shines the most seductive outward physical beauty.”

As society reordered its priorities and values after the turn of the century, so did self-help manuals. By 1909, the very same Orison Swett Marden declared in a new book: “You cannot estimate the influence of your personal appearance upon your future. . . . It does not matter how much merit or ability an applicant for a position possesses, he cannot afford to be careless of his personal appearance.” By 1921, Marden had further fine-tuned his advice, telling women to use their beauty as a way of attracting and holding attention and friends.
Hundreds of self-help books
and articles offered similar advice, emphasizing that one's appearance and a good first impression were stepping-stones to personal success.

Freud had exposed the split between an individual's inner psyche and external consciousness at the same time industrialization was separating private from public life by shifting work from inside the home to the factory. Regardless of whether people had read the great Viennese doctor, they had firsthand experience operating in different worlds. There was the
self when you were safe at home with family and the self you presented to the harsher world.

Later social scientists like Erving Goffman
, David Riesman, and Christopher Lasch expanded on the division between the private and public selves in a modern market system. Goffman talked about the “outer mask” that people offered others to win plaudits. Riesman's outer-directed personalities, products of an affluent consumer-oriented society, took their cues from friends and the mass media. Success was gauged not by internal standards of conduct or achievement but by how adept one was at passing, at physically adapting and fitting in.